The Lexical Aspect Hypothesis

Abstract

This chapter investigates the acquisition of tense and aspect by Chinese learners of Portuguese as an L2 from a variationist perspective (Bayley, 2013). Difficulties in acquiring the aspectual contrasts set by the Perfect Preterit and Imperfect Preterit tenses in Romance languages have been widely documented (Blyth, 2005; Giacalone-Ramat, 2002; Kihlstedt, 2002; Martins, 2008). This study investigates the role of <lexical aspect> for the marking of Perfect and Imperfect Preterit following the tenets of the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH). It intends to design a different look into the LAH, as it considers other variables in interaction. Results show that lexical aspect plays a significant role in the learners’ use of inflectional morphology for both verb tenses, showing the dynamics of the interlanguage continuum.